Year: 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional will launch on April 12 but you can beat the rush and secure your copy today by pre-ordering at the affordable estimated retail price of $549, a saving of $250. If you use a previous version of Visual Studio or any other development tool then you are eligible for this…

Aaron Marten’s blog “Pkgdef and the Experimental Instance in VS 2010” points out that when devenv.exe is invoked with the ‘/rootsuffix Exp’ switch, the VS Shell no longer uses the experimental registry hive. Instead, the shell merges the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 registry settings and the .pkgdef files in the user’s …AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0Exp\Extensions folder. If you have an existing…

The .pkgdef file was first introduced with VS 2008, to allow for easily registering packages targeting the VS 2008 isolated shell. Bill Wienberger details the rationale behind this change in the following blog entry: What’s A PkgDef? And Why? There are a couple of ways .pkgdef files can be created. For a managed package, the…

While it’s still possible to register your packages, by manually or programmatically adding the requisite registry keys and values under the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 registry hive, it’s no longer the recommended way to register your packages with the integrated (or isolated) shell. VS2010 now uses pkgdef and vsixmanifest files to integrate custom packages into the shell. For…

On systems where an application or device is actively using UIAutomation (Tablet, Multi-touch, etc), the IDE may crash if the user is typing while intellisense is being displayed or dismissed. KB article describing this problem will be posted to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;980615 in the next few days. A hotfix that addresses this problem can be downloaded from…